Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package I used to offer SEO services, but don’t any more for health reasons, so not taking on paying SEO clients.

Which plugin broke your site? I’ve developed two free plugins:

WordPress SEO Comments Plugin turns your comments into posts (a not so SEO’d version of the Stallion SEO Super Comments built into Stallion Responsive).

Stallion WordPress SEO Plugin replacement for SEO damaging noindex features of popular SEO plugins (this is also built into Stallion Responsive).

6 million visitors a month is a nice amounts of visitors, if your website tends to get a lot of comments (with so many visitors I’d expect a LOT of comments) Stallion Responsive even ignoring the onpage SEO that would be added to your articles would increase the visitor total just due to all the new content Google can index. If you could train your commenters to add useful comment titles (Stallion feature you used for your comment) you can gain a lot of long tail keyword SERPs you aren’t targeting via your articles.

I’m not sure why Stallion Responsive wouldn’t work with a news site? Generally speaking all a WordPress news theme does is present the content in a particular format, basically just a layout that looks like news sites like the BBC, CNN etc… Blocks of rich media content.

Your website has a standard WordPress blog layout (categories and blog posts just like this site) nothing particularly special/custom other than the home page layout generated by the theme/plugins which looks like a combination of an interesting WordPress Page Template (for the home page) and widget areas.

Look at your home page in various device sizes, looks like your theme is either not mobile responsive or broken?

Guess that layout is difficult to make mobile responsive, looks great in desktop (1,000px wide devices), but awful in anything smaller. With how Google SEO appears to be moving I’d be worried your site long term will take a traffic hit as more and more search engine users go mobile and responsive design is a must have.

Would not be surprised to hear you’ve seen a traffic drop since April/May 2014.

I do like the home page layout and working on some page templates and widget areas for Stallion Responsive to achieve that sort of layout and more layouts.

Once you get off your home page I don’t see anything special about your categories or WordPress posts.

They are just categories and posts, pretty much any theme can generate a similar output for 99% of your site. Looks like around 10 sitewide ads added via widget areas, nothing special.

That’s a LOT of ads, do you find they convert? With ad blindness I’d guess your regular readers pretty much ignore all the ads.

I find looking at sites like yours interesting from a how not to do things code wise. To generate your home page sliders etc… requires over 20 CSS and JS files, that’s a LOT of CSS and javascript. OK, so you want those features, but the rest of the site doesn’t use the sliders and most of the fancy stuff, yet all those CSS and JS files are still loaded sitewide! That’s a huge performance hit for no gain.

BTW Research has shown users tend to not use the featured sliders, they might click the first couple of links, but that’s about it. So having sliders with say 10 posts seems to be a waste of resources especially if they are added by the website owner just because it looks cool: I try to avoid adding features to my sites just because it looks good.

Perfect timing to ask this question as looking at news sites like CNN and the BBC with interesting rich media layouts I want to mimic via page templates and widget areas. Great thing about Stallion Responsive is page templates can be used on posts, widgets can be selectively used on a post by post basis** and there’s category templates as well. If I code page template and widget sets to create something like the CNN home page they can be used by any post on the site, not just the home page.

** Working on a widget area feature today to add widget areas within the middle of WordPress Posts via shortcodes, so any widget area could be loaded anywhere within a post.

David